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Monthly Archives: December 2015

Hi everyone! It’s been a while since our last product announcement, and I am excited to introduce a couple of new features and give a sneak preview of another that’s coming soon. Two features are being released today: Snip Editing and My Account Quality Alerts.

Snip Editing

Often times, Hubs get defeatured for minor issues— an inappropriate product, a glaring (but innocent) typo in the title, a promotional link or blurb, etc. We see these issues as problematic, but also easily fixable. Up until now, Hubs with these issues have been defeatured. Recently, we started sending Hubbers custom emails when Hubs are defeatured to point out exactly what is wrong. While we are glad that we can provide you with personalized feedback, we’ve found that this process can be time-consuming—both for Hubbers and HubPages moderators. So, we came up with the idea of Snip Editing.

How Does it Work?

Snip Editing is done by HubPages Moderators. With the new tools, they can fix spelling errors and typos in Hub titles and remove problematic links and capsules (for example, unrelated products, low-quality images, and inappropriately-used Ratings Capsules.) The tool does not give moderators the ability to add or change content. In fact, moderator snipping is done only on Hubs that are very close to meeting our standards, but would be defeatured due to one or more of the issues described above. In most cases, we will be removing spammy elements from Hubs so that they could more quickly become or stay Featured.

Moderators will only snip a freshly edited Hub once; after the first time, it is your responsibility to keep your Hub in compliance. If you add back problematic elements (links, products, etc.) your Hub will have a very high chance of becoming defeatured.

Will I Receive a Notification After a Snip Edit?

If your Hub had elements snipped, you will receive an email. The email will contain a link to a diff (a document with red and green highlighting) that will show you exactly what was changed. Those of you that have already participated in HubPro will be familiar with this document.

In addition to the email notification, snipped Hubs will also have the green pencil icon displayed next to their titles in My Account > Statistics. To make this icon more user-friendly, we decided to create two variations:

The existing, green pencil icon permanently appears next to any Hub that’s been edited (whether with HubPro Basic, HubPro Premium, or Snipping). Clicking on this icon takes you to the edit history page, with access to all of your diffs and before/after images of your Hub.

The same green pencil icon as above, but with a red exclamation point will appear next to any Hub that’s been freshly edited and has not been reviewed by you. Once reviewed (i.e., when the icon is clicked), the icon will change to the existing design without the red exclamation point.

My Account Quality Alerts

Similar to Hub Style Tips and Warnings, we are developing a few notices to alert you to quality problems we’re seeing at the account level rather than on a particular Hub. These notices will appear at the top of My Account > Statistics and will contain specific suggestions for how you can go about addressing the violations. To start, there are four types of alerts:

Keyword Stuffing — we have detected a pattern of overly-optimized keywords across many Hubs in your account

Products — we have detected that you have a low word-to-product ratio (< 300) across many Hubs in your account

Grammar — we have detected a pattern of grammatical errors across many Hubs in your account

Comments — we have detected ten or more unmoderated comments in your account

All of these warnings are designed with quality in mind. Because HubPages needs quality to continue to succeed in today’s environment, we urge you to take these warnings seriously. The first three issues from the list above— keyword stuffing, products, and grammar—all impact Hubber Scores, so addressing them is one way to improve your scores. Comment moderation does not currently factor into Hubber Score, but high-quality comments affect a Hub’s overall credibility—it’s best to keep them clean!

Coming Soon

In addition to the two features being released today, we are currently working on an interface that will show you the clickthrough rate data for various elements (links, products, etc) inside of a Hub. Having access to this granular information will allow you to better understand your readers’ behavior and improve your Hubs. For instance, you might find that a particular product capsule is rarely engaged with by your readers and decide to remove it. More on this soon!